had freed himself from its trammels, and devoted his life entirely to his whimsical and eccentric propensities. His habitation was one of the most curious places in Yorkshire, the rooms being hung round with agricultural implements of every description, and pieces of old iron, nails, and other rubbish. The inmates consisted of himself and a man and a woman servant, to which he added a tame fox, an otter, and a bull. This he rode during his shooting excursions, being then also attended by pigs and dogs, the former, as has been said, trained to scent, the latter to carry the game. He set the greatest value upon a waistcoat which he had formed from the front parts of the drake's neck, and to obtain which he had solicited the surrounding villages. He had three bulls, which were kept for the sole purpose of baiting at country feasts, after which his man generally collected from the populace.

James Hirst died, aged ninety-one, at Rawcliffe, in October, 1830, and his funeral was a most extraordinary one. It was his express wish to be carried to the grave by eight old maids, each of whom was to be paid 10s. 6d. for her trouble; and if this could not be effected, eight widows were to be engaged at 2s. 6d. each to perform the same service. The former wish, however, could not be complied with, either from want of a sufficient number, or from a desire of not publicly acknowledging a designation of such a contumelious and appalling import. The funeral proceeded from the house to the chapel, about four o'clock. The corpse was borne by eight

widows, and a solemn tune was performed the while with a bagpipe and fiddle, the former being played by a Scotch shepherd, and the latter by an inhabitant of Rawcliffe. During the ceremony, the chapel was crowded to excess; and the crowds of spectators from the surrounding villages flocked to witness the obsequies to a man whose eccentric habits had become proverbial throughout the district.

With reference to Hirst's pointing pig-another man, a keeper in the New Forest, also broke a pig to point game, and various conjectures were made as to how this was effected. One man stoutly maintained "that the pig, from the time of his being farrowed, was fed on nothing but partridge bones"!

A great character, though quite in another way, was Lord Barrymore, whose turf career began in 1787.

Lord Barrymore was considered the best gentleman rider of his day, but nevertheless he was not a very keen sportsman. He was too impatient of gratification in all his undertakings to excel in those which entailed patience and fatigue. He could ride boldly, but did not always display courage out hunting, when he sometimes retreated from leaps which his associates went at. As a rider to hounds, indeed, he was highly inconsistent, and one day would plunge with his horse into the Thames and swim to the other side, and a few days after hesitate to fly over a small hedge.

The turf proved fatal to his purse, and during four years cost him some hundred thousand pounds, after which he set out to better his judgment with the

most abandoned boxers, and adopted both the principles and practice of his Bohemian friends and contemporaries.

These necessitous and rapacious sharks, having once secured the weak side of this reckless peer, never abandoned him (nor he them) to the day of his death.

Lord Barrymore's disreputable friends introduced him to a curious circle. He became one of a learned company of disputants in a sixpenny debating society in the country town of Reading. Here Lord Barrymore gave one hundred and twenty pounds to enlarge the room of a public-house where the meeting was held, at the very moment when as many solicitous claimants were clamouring for payment.

In this debating society he would hold forth in vindication of the conduct of that Parliament of which he had "the honour to be a member," respecting the "slave trade," and animadverted largely upon justice and humanity. Recalling his political experiences in the House of Lords, he said that he "remembered having attended an important debate in the House, but unfortunately had forgotten on which side he had given his vote."

A very few weeks before his tragic death, which occurred through the accidental discharge of a musket, he submitted for discussion the following question :

"Whether it would be a derogation of dignity for a British senate to interfere with the executive power of France, to spare the life of Louis XVI, late King of the French ? "

His lordship, in an opening speech, called upon one of his Bohemian cronies (who he said had come purposely from London) to open the debate. The individual in question rose, determined to attract general attention, which he did, by somewhat unexpected means, addressing the chairman as follows:

"My worthy friend, the noble lord on my left, possesses every virtue that can possibly adorn the human heart."

Attended by the same man, Lord Barrymore frequented low billiard - rooms, where, during the progress of a game, he indulged in all sorts of pranks. Sometimes, for instance, he would produce a couple of fowls from the poulterer's, suspending each by a string, stripping to his under silk jockey waistcoat, making the egg sauce, laying the cloth, drilling the landlord, smoking (at the same time) his Dutch pipe, and indulging in all those brilliant effusions of fancy that in one of inferior order would have been deemed the effects of intellectual sterility, or in plainer language, downright stupidity.

His last effort of local popularity was the institution of a catch club or bacchanalian society at the little town of Wokingham, upon the verge of Windsor Forest, to which, at the distance of thirty-two miles, his musical toadies and Bohemian dependents were occasionally summoned to spend an evening.

A very different kind of noble sportsman was "Old Q," whose unvarying successes on the turf, when Lord March, not a little disconcerted the knowing ones. They falsely calculated on the usual quantum

of folly to which lords were generally supposed to be entitled, chiefly owing to their neglected education. In Lord Anson, on the other hand, they found a rich harvest. The treasure of the Spanish galleon became the prize of some sharpers at Bath; on which occasion it was observed "that Lord Anson had been round the world, and over the world, but never in the world."

Another noble supporter of the turf was the twelfth Earl of Derby, who not only delighted in racing, of which he was a supporter for nearly sixty years, but was also without question the most celebrated cocker of either ancient or modern days, and in this light never had his equal. During his life he fought more mains, and very generally successfully, than any person ever known. His birds, to which he was extremely partial, were by judicious breeding brought to the finest possible perfection; and nothing inspired the noble lord with more pleasure and gratification than the English game cock. Indeed, favourite birds were occasionally even brought to him in the splendid drawing-room at Knowsley!

In the early part of the nineteenth century Tattersall's presented a very comprehensive picture of the sporting world. Here assembled peers, baronets, members of Parliament, turf gentlemen and turf servants, jockeys, grooms, horse-dealers, gamblers, and spies, and here could be seen the oldest and some of the best blood in England, rigged out like coachmen, or like the whippers-in of a pack of hounds. In one place master and man consulted about the purchase or the sale of a horse; in another a person of rank